For centuries, wines and other beverages have been offered in glass jugs or bottles, which are filled at the point of manufacture and are transported to the locales where they will be opened and consumed. Because wines, in particular, are subject to deterioration and degradation once they have been exposed to oxygen, the standard method of delivery has been for the ultimate user to purchase wine by the bottle, and to open it only at the time when it will be consumed. Because wine, once opened, will not “keep” for more than a few days before its quality deteriorates, most wine is delivered in 750 ml bottles, and is intended to be consumed within a few hours of first being opened.
Because glass is breakable, glass wine bottles tend to be thick and correspondingly heavy, making long distance transportation both cumbersome and expensive. Nevertheless, because there are truly only a few regions of the world in which high quality wines are made, long distance transportation of wines in glass bottles is a problem for which few alternative solutions have been discovered. One increasingly popular alternative to packaging wine in glass bottles is to package it in plastic bags (or bladders) or foil pouches, and in some instances to package the filled bladders in cardboard or corrugated boxes for shipping and dispensing. Since plastic bladders can be used that, when treated with an O2 inhibitor, are essentially impermeable to oxygen, and because the bladder is flexible enough to reduce in size as wine is dispensed, the wine can be kept free from oxygen throughout the dispensing process, and can last for a period of months prior to being dispensed. As a result, wine-in-a-box or pouches has become popular with bars, taverns, and restaurants, who can now keep a variety of fine wines available for customers without having to waste wine in bottles that did not get used before quality deteriorates. In larger commercial establishments, wine “cabinets” or “bars” holding a number of different kinds of wine can be used with pumps and dispensing equipment to dispense wines as necessary, much in the same way that beer has been dispensed from casks or kegs for centuries. For smaller establishments and residential use, wine-in-a-box can be dispensed from a shelf using only gravity to cause the wine to flow.
Other beverages may also enjoy similar benefits from being placed in plastic bags that can then be packaged for shipment and dispensing in cardboard or corrugated boxes. However, the extreme sensitivity of wine to oxygen and to heat, and the relatively high expense of wine as compared to other beverages has caused wine to be the product that has driven innovation in this field.
One drawback to the mass production of wine packaged in boxes is that the various establishments and users have different taps or spigots (or none at all) for the dispensing of wine into glasses for consumption. What is needed is a tap that can be used for the filling and sealing of a plastic bladder, and that can also be used manually, to dispense wine from a shelf using gravity, or that can alternatively be attached to a pump and other auxiliary equipment for automated dispensing.